From: Marnie
Hmmm, long story, I'll try to shorten it.
The two buildings on the end right are closed and abandoned and have been
for some time. The store on the left end (with a bar) is still open. It is
a lot newer that than the others (relatively speaking).
This is a very, very small town (basically five buildings) that is verging
on being a ghost town. The Emporium & Bar and the Post Office (not shown)
struggle to keep going. It is in Northern Northern California.
I stopped by at the end of my Oregon/Washington trip, in the valley where
my father grew up, and again took some photos. I have shown a few before on
list.
The middle building is my great grandfather's store. He and my other great
grandfather both came to CA for the Gold Rush. Neither made any money from
finding gold, but one ended up having a very successful cattle ranch, and
this one ended up opening the first chain stores in Northern California
(general stores).
I, oops, accidentally, took a whole digital "roll" overexposed. I thought
I had it set on AV and the dial had been pushed to manual. (That won't
happen again, now I will check every time.)
Using Lightroom and suggestions from a new Lightroom book I got, I was
actually able to recover a couple.
The rest had interesting effects. I sort of like this one.
Certainly good enough for the "cover" of a PDF I am doing on my family
history (for family members).
http://www.mapphotography.com/PAWS/pages/store.htm
Tell me if you agree.
(I've thought about taking the foliage out from under the tree, but think
that might not be an improvement. I've also thought about adding
vignetting, ditto, might not improve it.)
I think the image as is might be "good enough" for a family publication.
It's still kind of washed out, like it was printed from a badly
underexposed negative.
For me, the problem is the lack of detail in the foreground, the side of
the closest building, the washed out spots on the cornice of great
grandpa's store, whatever that white area under the foliage at the end
of the street is and where the roof of the Emporium just disappears into
the sky.
You might add a layer and set the blend mode to multiply to give it more
density. You could do two or three layers using layer masks to add
density to specific blown out areas.
I'd do that before doing the B&W conversion.
And instead of taking the foliage out from under the tree, maybe try
adding foliage into the blown out area.
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